Saarinen's first Knoll commission — a sculpted molded shell on slim steel legs that quietly furnished half the boardrooms of the 1950s before the Tulip arrived.
Before the pedestal
Seven years before the Tulip Collection, Saarinen designed the Model 71 for Knoll — a foam-padded, fully upholstered shell on splayed steel legs, with or without arms. It was his first solution to the 'shell over legs' problem he would spend the rest of his career trying to abolish. The legs are slim and chrome; the shell is generous and soft. Read together, the chair is half-mid-century-modern and half-traditional executive — a transitional object between the leather throne and what came next.
Quiet ubiquity
Through the 1950s, the Model 71 became a default boardroom chair across corporate America — IBM, Bell Labs, General Electric, and most major US airline headquarters. It was less photogenic than the Tulip and never carried the same magazine presence, but it sold in volumes the Pedestal Collection never matched. Knoll's archives suggest more than half a million Model 71s were shipped between 1950 and 1965.
The CBS commission
When Saarinen was awarded the CBS Building commission in New York (designed 1960, opened 1965), he specified Model 71 armchairs throughout the executive floors — including in William Paley's office. The chair stayed in the building, in continuous use, through three rounds of corporate refurbishment, until CBS vacated the building in 2021.
Still in the catalogue
Knoll continues to produce the Model 71 in both armchair and side-chair versions, with a refreshed cushion specification but the same shell tooling and the same leg geometry as 1950. A current armchair in leather lists at around $2,400 — modest, by Saarinen-collection standards, and a reminder that his most-installed chair was never his most-photographed one.
From the archive
Belongs to the era of
1940s–1950s · Mahogany & Leather →Manufactured by
Knoll →More from the catalogue